Discussion - Amp vs Direct

I play for a church and have been running ampless for about 5 years now.... My rig switches up a lot with my pedals but my current setup is using full size tonex for my amps.... I have an HX stomp on my board as well but mostly use it for auxiliary stuff these days.. The tonex is incredible.. . My biggest issue is running out of headroom and sometimes if things arent dialed in perfect stacking drives only adds distortion but not volume for a part to jump out louder..
Hers a livestream with my tones from a service... Music starts @ 18:48
 
I've been playing ampless for years, but this year in particular been doing it live in small shows and a theater venue, and i've never sounded better!
I'm recently comming back from a Fractal AX8 because i've realized that my thing is not very kind on the modelling, i've actually grown tired of emulations, having stomp box sized pres, i'm moving to that, but keeping a door open for having an amp not so loud behind me mostly to not make the sound guys or the venue managers crazy (not many places have a good PA so we still "need it"), and our booking manager as well, because he also puts all the backline. I use an amp only as monitor and sometimes for the audience, but i always use direct for me to feed the in ears mix. I've grown so used to this practice that i don't really miss having an amp, BUT i need a part of the system to be analog, mostly preamp, drives and compression, because to me that's were digital falls short, i even had a phisical problem because of this, altering my playing technique to the point i became at the verge of having tendinitis. So going back to analog pre and drive is a must, also (i believe ) is to simulate as much as you can the power amp response, with eq curves and compression or with some electronic device (as Baja Reactor or PAE pedal) and only leave FX and the speaker response (IR) on the digital domain.
 
I’ve been running 3 amps for long time. Finally got a Strymon Iridium and I like it, at least for at home practice it sounds great in my ears and I don’t have to blast my neighbors away. I’ll see how it is live running stereo
 
Lots of valid opinions - real amps seem to be a lot more popular than i thought. I don’t play live much and definitely don’t tour, so i guess in my head i just saw all the advantages and none of the potential disadvantages of running direct.

I’ll add as well that during all the years i was using an amp the ONLY time i was really truly happy with my sound was with the mesa mark iv through a 412. Over 25 years i’ve had probably only 10 or 11 amps and all of them besides the mark had some thing or another that i didn’t care for.
 
CA138 said:
I went from tube amps to the Sansamp GT-2 to the first era of digital modelers (first Fractal rack unit), then to plugins (Neural DSP plugins with a MIDI foot controller was where I thought I would stay and I think it blows Fractal away). I still felt something missing, so started building analog pedals into the chain. Better, but not quite. I have finally landed on a Synergy tube preamp rack unit with a couple of pedal drawers - so full-circle!
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That gt2 has done numbers for me. I only recently got tube amps, there's definitely some sauce to the way they feel. But I've gotten a ton of mileage from my gt2 from a recording and mixing perspective. For my money running a metal muff into the gt2 on fender cleans is a real nice sound.
I think running direct just needs more love from fx is all. Reverb completely changed the game for me.
 
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